Astronomers spot a giant planet forming around a distant star. This planet is at an extreme distance from its star, and it's forming rapidly and violently.
Hubble’s most remarkable feature might be its longevity. The Hubble has been operating for almost 32 years and has fed us a consistent diet of science—and eye candy—during that time. For 13 of its 32 years, it’s been checking in on a protoplanet forming in a young solar system about 530 light-years away.
But there’s another way that planets can form, and the Hubble has been keeping an eye on a protoplanet that’s following a different path to planet-hood.” presents the observations in the journal Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope and Eureka Scientific., a young star only 2 million years old in the Auriga constellation. Our Solar System was the same age when planets started forming around the Sun.
“Interpreting this system is extremely challenging,” Currie said. “This is one of the reasons why we needed Hubble for this project – a clean image to better separate the light from the disk and any planet.” Disk instability is when a massive circumstellar disk collapses into planet-sized, self-gravitational clumps. These clumps then evolve into planets. Theory shows that disk instability should form planets at greater distances from the star than core accretion. “Disk fragmentation is expected to more readily occur further out in the protoplanetary disk where the radiative cooling rates are higher,” according to exoplanet astronomer Paul Wilson, who’s not involved with this study.
“Almost all of the ~5000 known indirectly detected exoplanets orbit their host stars on solar system scales ,” the paper explains. “The core accretion model, where a young gas giant forms by slowly building up a multi-Earth mass core and then rapidly accreting protoplanetary disk gas, accounts for gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn at these locations. In contrast, directly-imaged exoplanets typically have wide, 50-300 au orbits and are over ~5 times more massive than Jupiter.
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